A meditation on loss and remembrance of things past

Also in preparation for the inundation of the land along the Nile, the Egyptian government is clearing 70,000 Nubian people out of ancient villages, relocating them to bleak new cinderblock compounds far away from everything familiar: temples, gravesites, date palms, arable land.

Avery and Jean are queasily sensitive to the ethical ambiguities of the forced migration. They first met when Avery was working on Canada's St. Lawrence Seaway, another massive construction project undertaken in the name of "progress," which also entailed drowning villages and moving people who didn't want to go. Again, this kind of displacement destroys not only physical sites, but also all the memory and meaning embedded there. During the evacuation, Avery tried to reassure a woman grieved at having to abandon her husband's grave, suggesting that the engineering company would pay to have her husband's body moved. The woman answered: "If you move his body then you'll have to move the hill. . . . You'd have to move my promise to him that I'd keep coming to his grave to describe that very place. . . . Can you move that promise? Can you move what was consecrated? Can you move that exact empty place in the earth I was to lie next to him for eternity?"

Do people really talk like that? No. Does it matter? Not really. The woman's speech to Avery is a long dramatic monologue, the sort you'd expect to turn up in a play by J.M. Synge or Tennessee Williams, not in a modern novel. But again, "The Winter Vault" isn't really a conventional novel. Michaels, a poet whose earlier novel, "Fugitive Pieces," was an enormous critical and popular success when it was published in 1996, has written another meticulous and profound poetic meditation on themes that weave and recur as the characters tell their stories.